


iris

by flwrpotts



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, F/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-14
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-02-02 10:33:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12724941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flwrpotts/pseuds/flwrpotts
Summary: “Like father, like son,” he tells his reflection with a bitter twist of his mouth, holding up his beer in a sort of half toast.ORFive vignettes on the aftermath of 2x05





	iris

_ And I'd give up forever to touch you _

_ 'Cause I know that you feel me somehow _

_ You're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be _

_And I don't want to go home right now_

 i. Jughead

Toni kisses him. 

Toni kisses him and Jughead responds instinctively, tilts his head to better the angle. His chest is cracked open and his body feels like a distant, faraway thing but Toni is soft and warm and looking at him like she might actually notice if he disappeared. Kissing hurts, the raw sting of his split lip against her teeth, but it’s barely a ripple in the riptides of pain threatening to shred him to pieces.

_ Unmoored _ , he’d said just days before, and the ugly truth of it finally hits him, the sinking ship that is his life. He’s still kissing Toni, sliding her into his lap, but memories of Betty are bleeding in, receding into an incoherence of backlit flickers, choppy and poorly lit like an experimental film. Jughead drowns in the layers and layers of cognitive dissonance. 

Toni, or possibly Betty, tugs on his hair and his headache becomes a living thing, throbbing behind his eyelids like a sucker punch.The world tips and slides again, and suddenly Jughead doesn’t quite know which way is up, because Toni is tugging off his beanie and Betty is sighing into his mouth, and he’s tangling his aching fingers in blonde hair, or maybe it’s pink, and-

And Toni is pulling back, staring at him with so much pity that he doesn’t know how to stomach it. His lip lights up with pain, and Jughead realizes, distantly, that he is crying, the salt water dripping into his mouth. The irony of the whole thing causes a hysterical, slightly unhinged laugh to bubble in his chest. 

Toni drags a hand across the back of her mouth, wiping away a smear of blood. Jughead doesn’t know whether to apologize or not. Her eyes are shuttered again, as cold and removed as the first time her met her. 

“Go to bed, Jughead,” Toni says, not unkindly. 

The fog of his concussion makes time pitch and stutter again, and he doesn’t see Toni leave so much as he comes to the realization that she is no longer there. The world presses in again, like an ocean tide, and everything is raw and terrible and confusing. Jughead wishes suddenly,  desperately, for his mother. Her scent of menthol cigarettes and home, the way she would press a cool hand to his forehead when he had fevers as a child. 

_ She saw where you were headed, Jughead, we all did _ sneers Archie in his ear, somehow crueler than the first time, and Jughead wonders if his mother saw where he was headed, too, if that was why she had taken Jellybean and run. 

That thought alone is enough to make him stumble to the fridge, dig around for the cheap can of beer he hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to throw out. Jughead takes a long swig, and then another. 

He senses movement in his peripheral vision and looks up, a little too slowly. The image is fuzzy, but distinct. He stares at himself in the shitty trailer mirror. Split knuckles, beer in hand, all alone. He’s never looked more like the kid of F.P Jones. 

“Like father, like son,” he tells his reflection with a bitter twist of mouth, holding up his beer in a half toast. 

He takes another sip, one more after that, and curses himself for ever believing that a pipe dream could become real.

 

ii. Veronica

Somewhere on the other side of town, Veronica takes a third aspirin, knocking it back with a sip of lukewarm water. The dull headache still knocking at her skull is all too familiar, the ghost of a different time. She used to spend half the week hungover, greet the dry mouth and nausea like an old friend, the souvenir of another wild night. She had forgotten the way that hangovers muffled the world, made it smaller and more constricting. 

This time last year she’d be snorting a line off the sink in the school bathroom, debating with her friends over which club to hit up that night. For a terrible moment, Veronica misses the old days, misses her greatest concern being whether her shoes matched her minidress for that night’s party. Misses the endless parade of booze and boys and whatever drug Nick poured down her throat. 

As soon as she thinks it, Veronica’s stomach twists with a sick, seething guilt.  _ Nick.  _ She brought him to Riverdale, introduced him to her friends, left Cheryl alone with him. She knows, objectively, that she is not responsible for Cheryl’s near-assault. But her carelessness always seems to lead to collateral damage, leaving her unscathed. Ethel, Betty, Cheryl. Someone else always pays for Veronica’s mistakes. 

When Veronica was little, her  _ abuela _ used to tell her the same story whenever she stayed the night. 

_ Once, there was a girl who destroyed everything she touched. Grass turned brown, flowers wilted, birds stopped chirping.  _

“But  _ why _ ?” baby Veronica would interrupt, curled up in the rocking chair with her hair braided into two shiny plaits, “Why did the girl hurt everything?”

Her grandmother never answered, just pointed a crooked finger at her in warning and continued speaking. 

_ One day, the girl met a boy who was beautiful and kind, and they fell in love. But the girl knew that she would destroy the boy, as she had destroyed everything else.  _

_ Abuela  _ died when Veronica was six. Over the years, Veronica’s forgotten the rest of the story. All she remembers is that there was no happy ending. 

The memory seizes Veronica, and she stares at herself in the bathroom mirror, despising the luxury all around her, despising the way she has everything she has ever cared to want and it is still not enough. Her skin crawls and she turns on the faucet to run a bath, makes the water hot, and then  _ scalding.  _

She tugs off her expensive dress and even more expensive underwear to sink into the water one boiling inch at a time, hissing through her teeth at the temperature. When she’s fully submerged she lets herself slide all the way under, lets the tension unfold from her muscles. Veronica just wants to feel  _ clean _ again, wants to rinse out the smell of Bacardi and the taste of vomit and the feeling of hands sliding up her thigh. 

Veronica scrubs at her skin with peppermint soap and thinks of the look on Archie’s face when Nick pulled out the jingle jangle. She takes off her makeup and remembers every derisive remark Jughead’s ever made about her money. She steps out of the bath and hears Betty’s speech, the way she had looked at her in disgust. No, in  _ fear.  _

She promises herself, not for the first time, that she will not end up like the girl in the story, that she will change her fate. Water swirls down the drain and Veronica tries to believe herself. 

 

iii. Archie

Archie Andrews slides into a seat at Pop’s and tries to ignore the blood pooling at the corners of his vision. Dusk is falling, making shadows creep along the booths and for a moment Archie’s sure he can smell rust, sure that he can taste the iron, feel it caking under his nails and-

Pop slides his food over to him, greasy and familiar. The memory snags on reality, dissolves as quickly as it materialized. Archie draws in a deep, ragged breath and lets it out slowly. He opens his eyes and Pop’s is again a familiar place, the setting of a thousand happy memories. 

The moment passed, Archie takes a bite of his burger, methodically chewing bacon and lettuce, and mentally replays his conversation with Jughead for the fifteenth time. Jughead is becoming a  _ Serpent _ , and the knowledge hurts in a way Archie can’t quite fathom. 

When he thinks of Jughead, he thinks of them at age eight, spending every day of the summer reading comics in Archie’s treehouse. Thinks of them, age ten, finally allowed to go to Pop’s by themselves for the first time. Thinks of them, age twelve, racing their bikes all across Riverdale and talking about girls. Every childhood memory Archie has, Jughead is there, making snarky remarks and caring too much for his own good. 

He cannot reconcile Jughead Jones- lover of pretentious films, wearer of stupid beanies, the boy infatuated with Betty Cooper- with the Serpents, the gang that very well could have been responsible for shooting his father. 

But, as per usual, Archie’s anger gets the best of him. 

Archie is better with song lyrics than words, but he had planned out what he was going to say, had even written down bullet points on a McDonald’s napkin in his sloppy handwriting. But the sight of Sweet Pea and the rest of his thugs, Jughead looking like he belonged with them, had struck a match inside Archie, lit a forest fire he hadn’t braced himself for. 

He hears himself say  _ She’s been agonizing over it for weeks _ and winces, marvels at his own capacity for cruelty. Somehow, without meaning to, he’s managed to turn Jughead’s deepest insecurities into reality, manifest all of his nightmares. Guilt worms its way through his body. 

Thinking about Jughead inevitably leads to thinking about Betty, and Archie finds himself wondering how he’s going to tell her. 

She had looked so ill the last time he had seen her, the purple bags under her eyes growing darker by the day. And he had promised,  _ promised _ , that he wouldn’t be cruel, would make it so that she could walk it back later. 

The sick feeling rises in Archie’s stomach, bile rising in the back of his throat. If there was any chance to stop Jughead from joining the Serpents, it went up in ashes the second Archie started speaking. 

He wishes, stupidly, that Veronica was with him, that he could tell her everything. Veronica, who makes sense of the chaos in his head, who listens to him in a way no one else ever has, who always somehow knows what to do. But all he has is his heart too big for his body and series of frayed relationships and a history of spectacularly fucked up things to do. 

The blood is again beginning to pool. Archie pays his check.

 

iv. Betty

Betty’s heart skitters in her chest, panic swelling through her body like a rising tide. She knows, logically, that the Black Hood will keep her alive as long as she is useful. But Betty knows, somewhere deep in her chest, that she has an expiration date, that she cannot play this game forever. Betty has spent sixteen years chasing perfection, and always falling just short. Her failures already have a body count, an ever-growing number of casualties. She wonders if the Black Hood is watching her in her room. If he’s strangling Nick St. Clair. If he’s everywhere at once, watching,  _ killing.  _

Betty’s hands curl into fists slowly, deliberately, manicured nails breaking skin one by one. She feels blood start to well, feels the terror still flaying her body. If Jughead was with her, he would uncurl her fists gently enough to make her want to cry, would bandage her palms and quell the panic that threatens to consume her. But Jughead is somewhere across town, being inducted into a gang and probably never wanting to see her again. 

The blood starts to drip from her clenched fists, slide down in clean lines, and Betty watches, hypnotized by the sight. A dark corner of Betty’s mind whispers  _ he got what was coming to him, you have nothing to be sorry for _ , but the greater part is stuck on an endless loop of  _ he had parents/he had a future/an eighteen year old is dead because of me/oh god oh god oh- _

Betty’s nails dig deeper, and she gasps, the cycle disrupted. She feels like she’s on a tightrope, constantly tipping towards a fatal fall. Shuddering, Betty stands and starts to paw through her dresser, oblivious to the obscene streaks of blood left behind. She finally locates the orange prescription at the bottom of a drawer and swallows the Xanax dry, praying for just a five minute break from the relentless terror breathing down the back of her neck. 

Her heart rate is just beginning to slow when her phone rings, the manic jingle of  _ lollipop, lollipop, oh lolli-lollipop.  _ Tears drip down Betty’s face. She picks up the phone.

“Now, now, Betty,” the inhuman voice purrs, “Sinners take drugs. You’re not a sinner, are you?”

Betty swipes at the tears, smearing blood across her cheek and stinging the raw cuts across her palm. 

“It’s perscription, I swear. I’m prescribed it by a doctor,” she says, trying to keep the hysteria from crawling into her voice. 

“I think we both know who’s really prescribing it. No more, or it’ll be your mother getting a taste of her own medicine. And I don’t think she’ll enjoy it.”

The line goes mercifully dead and Betty sobs into her pillow, trying to muffle the noise. There’s blood streaked across her furniture, staining her sheets, drying in her hair, but Betty can’t quite find it in herself to care. 

She gives herself ten minutes to shatter before she rises from the bed to pull cleaning supplies out of a container. Her panic is gone, replaced by a deadly, depthless calm. She cleans her palms with makeup wipes, hissing through her teeth when they sting the crescent-shaped lacerations across her palms. More tears spring to her eyes, but Betty continues until all the blood is gone and she can press Hello Kitty bandages to the inflamed, jagged cuts. She cleans her room with the same mechanical precision, drained of emotion, and pencils in in the newest call into her Black Hood log. 

When the room is spotless and she can sort of breathe, Betty crawls into bed. Betty isn't stupid: she’s watched enough Hitchcock movies to know that she isn’t going to survive the psychological cat and mouse game set before her. She wonders, absently, which of her loved ones will die first because of her mistakes. 

Betty finally drifts off into an uneasy, restless sleep in the gray, predawn light. She wakes up crying, palms again crusted with blood, and the Black Hood laughs.

 

v. Toni

Toni kisses him. 

His face is beaten to a pulp, and her brain is screaming not to do it, but she kisses him. She's always been bad at calculating risk. 

When Toni was seven, her mother told her that love was for idiots and whores, voice slurred from her split lip and three whiskeys. Three days later, she was in the hospital with a fractured jaw after the man who was maybe Toni’s father slammed her face into a wall. Toni sat quietly in the hospital waiting room and got to see the X-Ray scan, the way that bone could shatter into tiny pieces, and never quite be the same again. She learned quick: to love is to destroy. 

_ South side is a dangerous place for pretty little girls like you _ an old man had once leered at her as she walked to school. He wasn't wrong. Toni survived off her wits and a killer left hook. When she's twelve, she walks into the White Wyrm for the first time, palms sweaty and heart pounding out of her chest. On her thirteenth birthday, she's officially inducted into the Serpents, and she's never looked back. 

In fact, she’s never looked back, never questioned anything until Jughead Jones walked into her life, annoying and gorgeous and too smart for his own good. She befriends him in order to convince him to join the Serpents. Pretentious or not, he’s the kid of F.P Jones, and in the South Side, that means something. 

Only, Toni starts to forget about all that, starts to lose sight of her goals. She talks to him and can’t stop wondering at the possibilities. They share all the same interests, have the same kind of brain, the same dark sense of humor. They’re both oddballs in the world of the South Side: destined for better things than the shitty cards life has dealt them. It would be easy to be with him, she thinks. They would be good together. 

That is, of course, until Betty Cooper had walked into the Black and Red office, $80 coffeepot in hand. Toni knows who she is, of course. She had read her barbed defense of F.P, admired the girl’s spine of steel. But seeing Jughead with his mouth pressed against hers had taken that nugget of admiration and turned it into spite, envy, a hundred other terrible things. 

Toni tries to get over it. She really does. Tries to bleach Jughead Jones from her memory 

and let them be happy and gooey together.  But Betty is blonde and beautiful and has never had to know what it’s like to have to live on food stamps. Jughead  _ lies  _ to her, doesn’t trust her with the uglier sides of his life. Toni thinks, a little desperately, that she could be better for Jughead than Betty ever could. She understands what it’s like to do whatever it takes to survive. 

So she makes snarky comments about Betty’s ponytail and talks about the things she knows Jughead likes and tries to convince him to formally join the gang. She bides her time and waits for Jughead to see everything they could be, waits for their moment to come. 

Except the moment finally does comes, and it’s hundred times more terrible than Toni ever thought it could be. Jughead is a Serpent and Betty is a “non-issue,” and Toni is smart enough to know it’s still doomed.

_ Some things you do just to see how bad they’ll make you feel  _ whispers her mind as she presses a kiss to Jughead’s mouth. He responds for a moment, slides his tongue into her mouth, and Toni thinks that maybe he could love her back. But his mouth tastes like blood and his hands are shaking on her waist and he whispers something that sounds a lot like  _ Betty _ . 

Toni forces herself to pull back, to salvage some scrap of her dignity. She looks at Jughead and knows, suddenly and terribly, that he would date her if she asked, would put himself through the motions. She also knows, just as irrevocably, that he will never love her the way that he loves Betty, the way that she loves him. 

Toni leaves the trailer, scrubbing hard at the tears threatening to fall.  _ Love is for suckers _ her mother hisses in her ear, and for the first time, Toni starts to really believe her. 

_ And I don't want the world to see me _ __  
_ 'Cause I don't think that they'd understand _ __  
_ When everything's meant to be broken _ _  
_ __ I just want you to know who I am

**Author's Note:**

> hi everyone! this is basically me just cry typing all my emotions on the fantastic hellhole that was 2x05. any comments/kudos are very much appreciated! oh, and the title comes from the hauntingly gorgeous "iris" by the goo goo dolls (seriously, look it up if you havent listened to it).


End file.
